The U.S. Debt Visualized is a great visualization of scale, and can be found at usdebt.kleptocracy.us, where you start with a single $100 bill, and start stacking them in orders of magnitude. Stack them on pallets, start stacking the pallets and show them in comparison to other real-world items.

$114,500,000,000,000. - US unfunded liabilitiesTo the right you can see the pillar of cold hard $100 bills that dwarfs theWTC & Empire State Building - both at one point world’s tallest buildings.If you look carefully you can see the Statue of Liberty.

Numbers this large become too big to truly comprehend to many people, and I love visualizations like this one that put the unbelievable high numbers into context and scale. Here’s one trillion dollars:

A visualization like this has a natural bias. Whatever object the designer chooses to show in relation to the stack of bills can make the pile appear large or small in comparison. In this example, the piles of money are truly staggering, but that’s all the reader can walk away with. In it’s defense, this visualization isn’t trying to propose a solution, it’s just trying to make the viewer understand how big the number is.

Reader Comments (3)

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